First Time

Han Yan's film opens with Shiqiao, twenty two years old. She lives with her widowed mother and wants to be a ballet dancer, but she carries the neuromuscular disease her father died of; she cannot push her body, and the medication she takes causes gaps in her memory. At a charity fair she runs into Gong Ning, a boy she has liked since school. He dropped out of university to give more time to the rock band he leads, and his previous girlfriend left him for being unable to focus his life. Despite her mother's objections the two start seeing each other. The film does not turn the illness into an engine for tragedy, describing instead the distance between wanting to dance and a body that will not. The ending is left unspoiled.